Main problem was SAP took a lot of work to administrate, which is not good if it you want a back-end database for an app and therefore don't have the luxury of an administrator! It's awkward to install, create databases, and has no "auto-grow" functionality.

It also took ***lots*** of resources, both RAM and hard disk space. In fact our database ended up requiring lots of both, and it wasn't anything of any size in terms of records etc..

I believe SAP is good for the situation where you have a db admin watching over it, and have a dedicated server with lots of disk space and RAM.

Yes, that's pretty much what I expected to hear, based on what others have said about SAP. It has good capability, but is not so easily managed or configured. Apparently the code itself is some odd mix of Pascal and C. I find it quite ironic that MySQL, the dean of lightweight, low-feature DBMSs has now made some sort of deal to own the SAPDB codebase. I'm sure they'll have a lot of fun with that one .

Anyway, it sounds like Firebird is a good match for what you need, and runs with an extremely low footprint, considering its impressive feature set.

PostgreSQL is probably closer to SAP in feature set, but has the drawback of not running well on a Windows server (it works fine for Windows ODBC clients, though). For what its worth, if your server is *nix-based, PostgreSQL is extremely easy to install and configure, and growth is virtually unlimited (obviously, you need to plan out your disk space, partitioning, etc...).

I've ported an internal application of our company to use Firebird as database server. It is about 5 months now without any intervention/maintenance and the performance is very good.
Few options to set up (cache size,aliases,sweep, etc) and your database will "fly"
I've read about Interbase databases runnig for years without maintenance.
You will find also a lot of utilities to manage Firebird databases
(I like IbExpert very much, has a free personal edition too)

You can't beat Interbase/Firebird databases in admin resources used. I have large Interbase DBs being hit pretty hard and the maintenance I do is twice a year, backup and restore.
However you should plan for this (regular backup/restore) as it is the only maintenance needed for a properly designed Interbase/Firebird database.
Also you should go for a Linux server. They are, in my experience, unstopable!

Originally posted by pacpinto You can't beat Interbase/Firebird databases in admin resources used. I have large Interbase DBs being hit pretty hard and the maintenance I do is twice a year, backup and restore.
However you should plan for this (regular backup/restore) as it is the only maintenance needed for a properly designed Interbase/Firebird database.
Also you should go for a Linux server. They are, in my experience, unstopable!

Yes firebird on linux really rocks
We had a customer that used ib4.0 on linux and they had called us , when we looked at the problem saw
that the ext2 partition was full (the ib log file growed to much) and the CPU was running with the fan stoped (was a k6-2).
They only stoped the server when there was no
electrical power . (we swiched to Firebird from that version). The only problem was the application (it was propietary no source code).
Imagine how stable is now with ext3 partition or
a raid5.
Ps : Now i'm porting a mssql server DB to Firebird , nice ...tried to port it on MySql but crashed on a heavy join (tried the 4.x version on both windows and linux ) so the only option is Firebird
This is a nice tool http://www.ibphoenix.com/a436.htm?a=...x&page=sql2gdb
I think there are many others ...http://www.ibphoenix.com/a436.htm?a=...=ibp_mig_tools